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Russian Dissident’s Passion Endures Despite Tests

MOSCOW — You almost feel sorry for the police officer tasked with detaining Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva as she led an unsanctioned protest on New Year’s Eve. It is not just that at 82 years of age she appears as fragile as a porcelain teacup, or that she was dressed as a Snow Maiden, complete with sparkly hat and adorable fur muff.

That is part of it. The other part is that as a young woman, Ms. Alexeyeva sat through so many K.G.B. interrogations that she rolls her eyes rather than count them. She was developing a variety of strategies to distract, deflect and otherwise irritate the authorities before the police officer’s parents were out of grade school.

Upon hearing the details of Ms. Alexeyeva’s arrest, Paul Goldberg — who wrote with her “The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era,” her memoir of life as a dissident — started to laugh. “They should actually print out pictures of Lyudmila Alexeyeva and hand them out to all the law enforcement authorities with a note saying ‘Do not arrest this person,’ ” said Mr. Goldberg, now an editor in Washington. “It is not fun to tangle with this person. She will make you feel like dirt, and she will not do it gratuitously. She will do it because you are dirt.”

Ms. Alexeyeva is now, by her own count, in her 43rd year of provoking official Moscow. The enemy these days is the soft authoritarian government ushered in by Vladimir V. Putin, previously the president and now prime minister, who methodically constricted the human rights movement. But long before that it was the airless confinement of Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, where Ms. Alexeyeva was one of a tiny group of intellectuals who risked their lives to press for freedom and human rights.

Nearly all from her circle are dead now, but the aura around them has never quite dissipated. Ms. Alexeyeva, who now walks with difficulty, can still lead a demonstration, which is what she was doing when she was detained on New Year’s Eve. Just a shade over five feet tall, she provokes reverence, exasperation and the question of how the movement will reshape itself when the grande dame is gone.

Ms. Alexeyeva grew up in a world suffused with whispers. There was muffled weeping when her neighbors were arrested in Stalin’s purges. At 19, she was reported to a Communist party secretary for reciting banned poetry. Soon after she turned 40, she volunteered to type the Chronicle of Current Events, a journal compiled in such secrecy that not even its contributors knew one another’s roles. Once, hauled in for questioning, Ms. Alexeyeva stuffed eight copies of the manuscript into her bra.

Photo

By Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva's own count, she is in her 43rd year of provoking official Moscow.Credit
Valery Nistratov

Everyone knew the sentence for crimes against the state: seven years in a penal camp and five years in exile. On her way into K.G.B. headquarters, Ms. Alexeyeva would stop to buy a ham sandwich, an éclair and an orange. These were delicacies in the 1970s, even for the investigator, who was headed for a lunch of gray cutlets. Halfway through, Ms. Alexeyeva would unwrap her lunch and lay it out on the table.

“They reacted very nervously when they started to smell ham,” she said with a sweet smile. “Then I would start eating the orange, and the aroma would start dissipating through the room.” The effect was reliably hypnotic.

“That’s how I amused myself,” she said. “It was a way to play on his nerves.”

Her career could have ended with emigration, as many of her colleagues’ did. But in 1993, after 16 years in the United States, Ms. Alexeyeva and her husband moved back to a changed Russia. As chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, the organization she helped found in 1976, she surveyed a changed landscape. Human rights organizations worked out of offices and published their work on Web sites. What they did was now legal.

New fears have replaced the old ones, though. Ms. Alexeyeva has received death threats, and last year she buried two friends who were killed. Legal risks are unpredictable, too. While Soviet dissidents could strategize to protect themselves — knowing, for example, that prosecutors needed at least two witnesses — their tricks are of no use in a post-Soviet justice system, where cases can be wholly fabricated, she said.

“Now they do what they want,” she said. “There were rules then. They were idiotic rules, but there were rules, and if you knew them you could defend yourself.”

Equally troubling, for some of her peers, is the fact that human rights campaigners still address the same narrow, elite slice of society they did in Soviet times — their argument is simply steamrolled by Mr. Putin’s popularity. Tanya Lokshina, deputy director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, said that activists faced the central challenge of “finding the language that is convincing for Russian society.”

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Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva, by her tally in her 43rd year provoking Moscow, was detained Dec. 31. Credit
Mikhail Voskresensky/Reuters

“That language would have to be different from the language used by Soviet dissenters,” she said. “In a sense, it is easier, strategy-wise, to be opposed to a full totalitarian regime than it is to try to counter a more sophisticated, strongly authoritarian one. There is some freedom. How do you explain to people what exactly they are lacking?”

Ms. Alexeyeva has heard these arguments, and she rejects them. She casts the democratic rollbacks of the Putin period as the recoil that inevitably follows revolution, not as a catastrophe. As for the notion of outreach to the public, she believes that Russians are passive because they are poor, and that that will not change as long as they remain so.

“They are completely not stupid people; they understand everything,” she said. “They just have no power to act. They have no power to even think about these issues, to analyze them, never mind being active.” She pointed to long-stemmed roses sent by a man she had helped free from prison.

“We don’t need to convince him using any marketing. He understands that I helped him,” she said. “We will keep focusing our strength on this, helping people. That is our marketing.”

That said, there are moments when Ms. Alexeyeva shows a grandmaster’s genius for getting her message out, especially to the West. One was her New Year’s Eve rally, regularly held on the 31st day of the month in homage to the article in the Russian Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of assembly. The last time, everyone was arrested except Ms. Alexeyeva, but this time she was swept up with 50 others onto waiting buses. It did not take long for the police to realize their error: within 40 minutes, one of them opened the doors of the bus and told Ms. Alexeyeva she was free to go. She refused, and by that time photographs were beamed around the world showing a wraithlike woman looking up apparently in terror at an officer in camouflage.

In fact, Ms. Alexeyeva had rather expected to be arrested, so she had ordered a shipment of hot meat pies delivered to her apartment and told the guard to admit her New Year guests. A party was in full swing at 11 p.m., when she arrived home from the police headquarters. Russian leaders would wake up to angry statements from the United States National Security Council, and then from the president of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, who said he was “profoundly and personally touched when I think that this very respectful 82-year-old woman spent the night of New Year’s Eve under Russian arrest.”

A few days later, as she watched snow sift past her window, she retold the story for the hundredth time with evident satisfaction. “If it serves as a lesson to them, I wouldn’t call it a victory, but it would be useful,” she said. “Whether it will serve as a lesson I can’t say, because they study very badly.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 12, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Tested by Many Foes, Passion of a Russian Dissident Endures. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe